It’s the end of another semester, and that means it’s final project time for our undergraduate Systems in Organizations class. Our Systems class is a cool combo of process design, operations, and technology. By the end of the class, the students should have many tools, ideas, and techniques for making things work better in organizations.
Our projects this semester included:
- Reducing check-in delays at a downtown hotel
- Reducing the amount of expired product thrown away at a major beverage distributor
- Eliminating manual timesheet processing at a university cafeteria
- Reducing incorrect order entry at an Asian food manufacturer
- Improving the email capabilities of an online application system for a student organization
- Redesigning the USF dorm assignment process
- Improving pizza delivery with online service
- Addressing information access problems at the San Francisco Police Department
- Improving the language tutoring process
- Improving disabled access to ATMs
Click below to get short project summaries. Thanks to all the 308 students for putting up with the JP way!
Reducing check-in time at downtown hotel
Problem: for 25% of check-ins, the front desk does not know whether a room is ready or not, resulting in delays that double check-in time from 6 to 12 minutes.
Solution: a simple hands-free, two way radio system for less than $350 that will substantially reduce these delays.
Reducing expired product at a major beverage distributor
Problem: beverages kept at the distributor past their due date cost the distributor over $158,000 last year.
Solution: forms redesign to remove redundant information, process redesign to remove unnecessary approval steps, and new handheld scanner technology to reduce the material loss by one third.
Eliminating manual timesheet processing at university cafeteria
Problem: 165 student timesheets per week are being processed manually, taking over 10 hours per week of human resource office time.
Solution: use existing student employee timesheet system to completely eliminate this error-prone manual task.
Reducing incorrect order entry at Asian food manufacturer
Problem: orders are entered manually into a spreadsheet, causing expensive errors up to 25% of the time.
Solution: move order entry and tracking from a spreadsheet and printout to a simple relational database in Microsoft Access.
Improving email capabilities of online application system for student organization
Problem: the online application system for the world’s largest student organization lacks any email functionality, the main reason why only 36% of student chapters use it.
Solution: new automated email alerts and confirmations, searchable archives, and mass emailing capabilities, increasing system use to nearly 100% of all chapters.
Redesigning the USF dorm assignment process
Problem: 60% of students are dissatisfied with a dorm assignment process that always prioritizes building preference over room size or specific roommates.
Solution: change the room assignment process, and databases, to allow students to decide which preference is most important. Create a process to survey student satisfaction.
Improving pizza delivery with online service
Problem: a local pizza franchise has order & delivery times 20-45 minutes longer on average than their competitors.
Solution: use a third-party web-based pizza ordering system to reduce delays by 20%, while reducing order errors and increasing average order amount by over 50%.
Addressing information access problems at the San Francisco Police Department
Problem: the SFPD is one of the few major police agencies in the nation that does not enter every detail listed in crime or arrest reports into a database that all of its investigators can easily access; the rate of solved violent crime cases is less than half of the San Diego or San Jose Police Departments.
Solution: deploy Treo phones and custom software to key SFPD personnel.
Improving the language tutoring process
Problem: 66% of surveyed students are dissatisfied with language tutoring.
Solution: modify the tutor hiring process to include an online application system, and set new hiring criteria.
Improving disabled access to ATMs
Problem: disabled bankers have difficulty using ATM machines; Bank of America’s 10,000 talking ATMs have significant drawbacks.
Solution: use smart cards to store user profile information to tailor interactions by user need.